Guest Post by Helen Simonson: Writers on Tape

Helen Simonson hails from Sussex, land of rolling chalk downs and many, many sheep.

I recently drove seven hours from my home in the Washington DC area to the Hamptons. Driving alone, with just my dog for company, I listened to a wonderful set of CDs my mother had given me called The Spoken Word: British Writers, one in a series produced by the British Library Sound Archives. On three CDs, famous writers, including Virginia Woolf, Rudyard Kipling and Somerset Maugham, spoke, lectured or were interviewed about writing. It was haunting to find myself barreling up I95, listening to writers, some of whose voices were only just able to be caught and recorded. The recordings are soft, the words often mumbled and the scratchiness of early technology (shellac discs) is evident. None of the writers had been given ‘media training’ and it was fun to hear the long pauses, coughs, striking of pipe matches and clinking of tea cups or train announcements in the background of various interviews. The voices too, spoke an English long disappeared; even from the royal family. They used ‘e’ instead of a short ‘a’ - so that Pall Mall became Pell Mell, and happy became heppy.

In a 1958 TV interview, Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, was asked if the coming of recording technology spelled the end of the written word and if all novels would become spoken. He mused on the economic difficulties of publishing and suggested that the cheaper spoken word might be a way out, though it would require novels to give way to shorter pieces. It was strange to realize that the current debate over the rise of the e-book is really as old as the gramophone. I am comforted that if the eight-track tape recorder did not spell the end of books, that even in the internet age, they will survive. It is one of the joys of my email inbox, by the way, to hear from people who have read me on Kindle, or some other e-reader, and write to tell me they have then rushed out to buy a copy. It seems the books we truly love demand a physical presence in our homes.

In scraps of a 1937 radio piece, the only surviving recording of her voice, Virginia Woolf spoke of English as an ancient language where every word comes freighted with echoes of the ways it has been used before; such that the writer’s task of combining words in new ways is made almost impossible. I thought of the word (and place), ‘Agincourt’ and how difficult it would be to use it without conjuring Shakespeare’s Henry V. I thought of putting a posy under a ‘bell jar’ and how Sylvia Plath had taken those words out of circulation; much as a famous baseball jersey might be retired. Most of all, I decelerated to an unacceptably slow pace for highway driving, as if this might somehow extend the joy of hearing the real Virginia Woolf talking to me.

Meanwhile, Rebecca West, journalist, critic, author and early suffragette, spoke to her interviewer, in 1958, of what a shame it was that so many people were now being taught to read and how this post-war expansion rendered it much less feasible for any one person to distinguish themselves in the art. She seemed to genuinely deplore the mediocre masses being granted access to the treasure of books and education. This was a sad reminder that even the most progressive of people may hold bigoted ideas in some areas. And isn’t it funny how the advancement of others is fought so hard by those who already hold all the advantages? If Rebecca West had been in charge of post-war education, I might have been trained to run a sewing machine instead of being introduced to Shakespeare and Chaucer!

As I walked my dog in a highway rest area or tried to eat a hard-boiled egg while negotiating a toll booth on the New Jersey Turnpike, I thought about all the writers we will never hear on CD – those who lived before the advent of sound recording. I will never hear Jane Austen talk about Emma, or poor Boswell defend his obsession with Samuel Johnson. I gained a new appreciation of the importance of capturing, in sound and video, writers talking about their work.

Accepting that writers belong in a multi-media world is not a easy position for me. I’m not that comfortable on video (no close-ups please!) and I’m suspicious of recording devices – too many politicians have been caught making off-color remarks into open microphones. I want people to judge my work independent of what they might think of me and I’m afraid of being captured and preserved in some awful dress and unfortunate hairstyle (is that Helen Simonson with the mullet and caftan?). However, it was just too wonderful to listen to Somerset Maugham sum up his life’s work and muse, in 1949, whether a few of his stories might survive the ages. I wanted to talk back and let him know he was still read and had a new biography out! I realized that I want to hear and see all my favorite writers and I think this means I need to stop being afraid of the video camera myself. So I’ll be looking for more of these British Library sound recordings and I’ll be seeing you on YouTube, folks!

Guest Post by Helen Simonson: My First Book Tour

At Book Expo America 2010 from left to right: Leslie Sari, Kay Hodges, Helen Simonson, and Marsha Toy Engstrom, The Book Club Cheerleader

photo courtesy of Marsha Toy Engstrom

I’m just back from my first book tour! I published my debut novel, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, in early March and while not all debut authors are sent on the road, my book did well enough that my publishers, Random House, sent me on five weeks of touring. You are probably wondering what is so blog-worthy about a writer going on book tour? After all, isn’t that what writers do? But this is my very first novel and my very first tour, so I felt like a small child in a pink tutu on her first trip to the big candy store downtown. In security lines at regional airports, I slipped in and out of my ruby slippers. Arriving in new cities, I was as starry-eyed s if my media escort were meeting me with a glass coach rather than a Honda Civic.

I loved the hotels. They looked just like regular hotels, with lobbies and cute little bottles of shampoo and room service, but I didn’t have to pay for them, so they all seem more shiny, and I didn’t have to wait for my husband to leave the room to dive into the minibar (my husband believes minibars do not offer good travel value).

I loved being escorted. I made an immediate pledge to myself not to take unfair advantage of this service and act like some diva. However, I did allow many of my wonderful escorts to drive me around the nicest homes in each city and of course I always asked to lunch in some obscure spot, beloved of locals – but only if it wasn’t any trouble.

I had intended to treat my tour like a spa trip and eat nothing but salad and fish. But some of the obscure local spots had things like biscuits or maple pancakes and it would have been rude not to try them. I also tried to avoid wine, except wherever I was being toasted. I would not have eaten the chocolate-covered coffee beans, given to me by a nice bookstore owner, had I not been desperate for more room in my cute carry-on bag.

I may be making it sound fun, but many authors complain about book tours being very exhausting. I do have to agree. Some days I had to be chauffeured to two appearances, not one, and reading all those pages and signing books until my wrist ached was not easy; even though I am a trained professional. I had to chat with my readers, maintain my best behavior at power lunches with industry folks – and then there was all that flying, with the associated task of buying magazines in airport newsstands. Some days I really could have used an afternoon nap.

I can’t tell you what a relief it was to get home and back to being a stay-at-home mom with laundry and grocery runs and car pools. I welcomed a little relaxed vacuuming and washing the dog after all the hard work.

However, in retrospect it was such good fun that I believe most writers must live in constant danger of wanting to be on book tour instead of buckling down to write novels. Why face the blank page and writers’ block when you can instead face the impossible decision between room service and the hotel brasserie!

Guest Post by Helen Simonson: Writing Interrupted

My writing style can be best described as procrastination plus panic. It took me five years to write my debut novel, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, and it might have taken a lot longer, had the crashing economy not made it vital to finish my MFA thesis and go find a ‘real’ job. After a slow process in which a single chapter might take me a month to complete, and the computer date stamps showed weeks of inattention, I finished in a mad dash. I endured six weeks of terror in which self-doubt appeared as a very hairy little goblin woman who sat on my left shoulder and screamed abuse in my ear, while my world shrank to the three gray walls of a fabric cubicle and the glow of a laptop screen.

Don’t get me wrong. Sometimes I really like the writing. What I like is the completely blank mind that comes …after I have said aloud the awkward meaning of what I am trying to say, only ungrammatical…and just before the perfect phrase pops up; syntactically shiny and glowing with freshness. Those moments make me get up from my office chair and do a little jig of joy. I also like the thrill of pages fresh and hot from the printer, with numbers in the footer and my name on the top left; Helen Simonson. Imagine then how fabulous it was when I was finally presented with my name in print, on the cover of a real book!



I have written only one novel so far and I am horrified to report that it began with the slightest of ideas. I had a moment of clarity in which I decided to write something for myself, and my mind immediately produced a small brick house in the country and an older man, wearing his dead wife’s housecoat, answering the door to a stranger. I believe this moment of authentic self – in which I refused to care what others would think of me – was important to me and will be to you. We’d all like to be Tolstoy or Chekov, or Alice Munro, and sometimes we want that so badly that we reject our own voice; the one with the tendency towards humor and the distinct lack of interest in alienation, suburban angst, drug addiction - or sex presented as an act of nihilism. However, at best we can expect to produce somewhat competent pastiches of more famous (more depressed?) writers. To write something unique, I now believe, we can only go with the voice we have and hope that it is enough. When I wrote for myself, something sprang to life that I had not been able to create before. Give it a try.

Once I had a few lines, I just tried to keep going. Writing is like making one of those awful mosaic tabletops with broken plates and grout. Small shards of ideas, experience and images seemed to funnel from my head into my fingertips. I wrote linear, chapter by chapter; I also made visual story webs with fat markers on large sketchpads, as if I were in middle school. What I refused to do is to jump around and write all over the place, hoping to fit it together later. Many people like this method but I found it too scary.

I don’t believe it matters whether we write in a writing studio or on a park bench, watching our kids playing. What we all need is just to pile up pages. I find the biggest problem in piling up the pages is headspace. If I so much as look at email, consider the dirty dishes in the kitchen, sneak into the refrigerator or fight with a telephone marketer, my head fills with noise and my writing is over for the day. I try to write in the mornings and to set aside anything else that pops into my head (call the plumber, pay the mortgage, am I picking up a kid or is he going to Crew?) by writing it in a daily planner under the heading ‘call after 1pm’. I also found office space outside of my home. It’s a place I can be ‘writer’ instead of ‘mother’ for a few hours. A coffee shop might do the same trick.

I think that any kind of space and support you can build around your writing will help it survive. A set writing time, a writing class, a weekly editing group, a brief writing window carved out lunchtime at your ‘real’ job– all these can be useful. As my pages piled up, I found that they provided a foundation of support under the idea that I could be a writer. My longtime writing group, with their acerbic edits and my MFA classes with their discussions of ‘craft’, helped make writing an education, while I piled up enough pages to make it a real job. Good luck with your writing!

Helen Simonson

Kepler's Writing Group Member Profile: Kalpana Mohan

The More I Write

For the longest time, my husband and my daughter told me that I should start a blog in which I posted random thoughts and observations. I shrugged. First of all, my family could not advise me. And, I did not have anything interesting to say. My observations were puerile, my conclusions, unoriginal. Who in the world would want to read my musings?

Despite myself, however, I began writing. I gathered the courage to post my thoughts in a blog titled “If the World is Flat, Why am I on Edge?” It was strange. The day I started posting, ideas spammed my brain. Like Google Alert on Permanent PMS, I found myself increasingly on edge, tuning in to keywords, watching the world falter around me, bristling when something cramped my style, scouting the daily news with a sullen giggle.

When I received a postcard with semi-erotica splayed all over it, I started. Was my mailman flirting with me? Why, I wondered, did the postcard shout “Hello Bombshell”? My thoughts on the subject became a whacky post titled “Dear Victoria: Keep Your Secret”. Then, yet another day, I was in San Francisco taking public transportation from Russian Hill to Civic Center. I spun my trip on the Muni into a story about the charm of commuting with strangers from one point to another. My father’s fascination with the lunches I prepared for him simmered into an essay on our interactions during the four months he stayed with me after my mother passed away. Oh, and yet another time, I was furious about how I was treated at a consulate just because I didn’t look like Angelina Jolie in my passport photo. Then a few weeks ago, my pressure cooker burst in my kitchen. The mishap not only sprayed its gravy onto a video blog. It sprouted into a piece of flash fiction titled “The Nerve of My Myrtle” which you can read at the end of this post. Two weeks ago, a friend, a Saratoga councilwoman, passed away after complications from advanced lung cancer. I regretted that I had never really made an effort to know her better. I was amazed at the responses (on Facebook, on email, via telephone and in person) that the words of my post elicited. I could not believe how my thoughts resonated with so many women (many of whom were unknown to me) who said they wished they had taken the time to know the brave and accomplished young lady.

One thing is now clear, I tell you: the more I write, the more I have to write.

The Nerve of The Myrtle

“Rice today, again?” she asked me, her yellow-green leaves unfurling under the growing April sun.

“Why? You have a problem with that?” I snapped. “Not like you eat anything I make anyway. You always eat out.” I don’t like my crepe myrtle prodding me about my cooking.

I hurried back inside the house. I let the door bang. She must have felt the gust of wind. The nerve. This is the problem with everything I’ve tended to gently, adoringly.

She was a bare brown twig just a few seasons ago. Then she was ablaze every May, coquetting pink with everyone who drove by. But all on a sudden, she stopped coloring her branches. I fed her the same thing that I was feeding all my other trees. She began standing there, her claws up and out, an emaciated witch with her broomstick stuck in the mud. I don’t know what was eating into her.

I really didn’t care to discuss my culinary plans with a tree which decided to boss me around simply because I came out several times in the day to hang out in my front yard and get some sun.

On one of those recent mornings when I was out, I heard her bare-knuckled twiggings.

“What?” I barked. I can’t hold it in when I’m miffed.

“Oh, nothing!” she said, swaying a little, may be even sensing my prickliness. But I heard a crack rising in one of her branches. In the past, she had shaken so hard that she lost a glad-load of leaves when she found out I’d overcooked my cauliflower, again.

“The potato was perfect today. Crunchy-roasted. Spicy. Just enough salt and spice,” I said, to no one in particular, standing on my driveway.

“Goo-od.” She rustled the “good” with her fifth branch anti-clockwise and creeped me out, I tell you. Her gnarly sixth branch was about to ask me something.

“Whatttt?” I hissed.

“Heard your pressure cooker burst last week? Was that your third? Or fourth?”

“So? Think I can’t cook without one?” I challenged her, digging my heel into her bed.

“The world didn’t have pressure cookers. People just cooked their lentils for forty minutes or three hours. As long as it took. Pressure cookers are for people under pressure. Not for people like me. Don’t you understand? NOT FOR PEOPLE LIKE ME WHO HAVE ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD. Which is why I am talking to a tree. Can’t you see?”

Just then a strong sheet of wind sailed our way and she shivered and I could swear she quickly bent over to tell my boxwoods something funny because they rippled to the right, all of them together, until seconds later I saw my miniature rose projectile-sputter and scatter its peach-pink flower petals all over my driveway.

The sprinkler came on many times that day. The water ran down my driveway and down the road until you couldn’t tell the tears apart from the real thing.



http://www.kalpanamohan.org